Random

via emceezansari. Emceezansari is an anonymous blog that does a remarkable (and hilarious) job of superimposing Aziz Ansari’s face on various hip hop album covers. Selections include Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, and Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready To Die, among others. Check out the rest below.

Forget the iPhone taser application… here’s the real thing! Seth Froom came up with the idea for the “Yellow Jacket iPhone” case after an armed robber broke into his house and stole cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices. He wondered how the situation could’ve played out differently if he had some form of protection. Froom and co-founder Sean Simone are currently fundraising on Indiegogo to make Yellow Jacket a reality. What happens when you try to put the thing next to your face? Are we going to have people inadvertently stunning themselves? Apparently the Yellow Jacket “features a safety switch and a rotating electrode cap, both intended to prevent accidental discharge”. Haha. We’ll see. They are currently at $31,794, and have 12 days left to reach their goal of $100,000.

Ashima Shiraishi is a 4-foot-5 Japanese-American 11-year old girl who can kick anyone’s ass rock climbing. She grew up climbing boulders in Central Park when she was 6 – her parents came to the US from Japan in 1978 – and for the past couple of years has been dominating some of the hardest climbs in the world including the Crown of Aragorn, a V13 (do you know how hard that is??) near El Paso that most adult professional climbers can’t flash. Yes, she does have the advantage of being tiny. But that doesn’t make her any less badass.

This is a pretty cool video by artist Richard Kendall, which he created using light and bullet time. He notes that this finished work is the result of 3 months of shooting on location with the bullet time rig around China, a 96 camera rig, 30s sequential exposure, a lot of running around with light, and combining manual/pulsing strobe flash. I’m not sure if he used this to create his paintings, but it seems like it would have a similar effect.

Yesterday, Google created an interactive Moog synthesizer on their homepage in homage to what would’ve been Robert Moog’s 78th birthday. The interactive, online Google Moog Doodle allows you to play the instrument as well as to record and layer tracks.

via boredpanda. This bathroom is inside a penthouse in a home built in Guadalajara, Mexico. The bathroom itself was built over an old elevator shaft and topped with a transparent floor. Extreme bathrooming anyone? More photos below.

via ukmirror. I thought this was funny. More photos below. (Slightly NSFW)

(UK Mirror) – Austrians considering renaming their village from F*cking to Fugging have been told to think again – because the name is already taken. Villagers at F*cking in Upper Austria voted yesterday to change the name to Fugging. But then came the news that there used to be a second village with the name F*cking in Austria – and residents there had already bagged the name Fugging more than 100 years ago.

Fugging mayor Andreas Dockner – 200 miles away in Lower Austria – said: “Nobody alive now remembers why it was changed from F*cking to Fugging, but it was and that is now our name. We think one Fugging in Austria is enough.

Now, F*cking mayor Franz Meindl said that apart from the name their tiny village with just over 100 residents would be a rural paradise. He said: “It is beautiful countryside here, it’s otherwise peaceful and we have a good community. It’s only ever the name that causes us troubles.”

F*cking residents said the final straw was a growing number of calls by pranksters from abroad who ring up locals and ask in English “Is That F*cking” – before bursting into laughter and hanging up.

“The phone calls are really the final straw”, said F*cking Mayor Meindl, who confirmed that the villages street signs were regularly stolen – even though they had been welded on steel posts set in concrete in the ground.

Drivers heading into the village often disturbed naked couples romping in front of the signs, and local entrepreneurs made the situation worse by flogging off F*cking postcards – F*cking Christmas cards and even more recently a F*cking beer.

Fugging mayor Dockner added: “If our village was called F*cking, I don’t think it would be a problem – we are proud of it and I’m sure we wouldn’t change the name – I’d advise F*cking not to change anything.”

Also available on the online Austrian telephone book are the villages of “Oberf*cking” “Windpassing”, “Wankham” and “Rottenegg”.

Software developer Greig Stewart p/k/a Theramin Hero performed a laser harp rendition of the Tetris theme for his audition on Britain’s Got Talent. What is a laser harp you may ask? It is an electronic musical instrument consisting of several laser beams, in analogy with the plucking of the strings of a harp, in order to produce sounds. It was invented by Bernard Szajner, and later popularized by Jean Michel Jarre. When I first watched the video, I wondered how it really works. Check out Greig Stewart’s performance (must be watched on YouTube), and a demo by Stephen Hobley after the break. Amazing.

The laser harp below is driven by Arduino (Boarduino variation) and connected to the impOSCar VSTi software synthesizer. The TAOS sensor array sits on its own stand.